


Supplemental: The Kingdom of the Blind

by gaslightgallows (hearts_blood)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Ficlet Collection, Gen, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:06:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 4,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27591785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hearts_blood/pseuds/gaslightgallows
Summary: A collection of notes, sidenotes, errata, interleavings, and unheard internal monologues. To be updated and rearranged as required. Background material forThe Kingdom of the Blind.
Relationships: Elias Bouchard/Peter Lukas, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Kudos: 6





	1. Carnival Ride

**Author's Note:**

> This is mainly just a place to collect any prompt fills I do on Tumblr that happen to be relevant to _Kingdom_ but don’t fit into the narrative proper. (I’ll do a separate collection for all the unrelated ficlets, which are far more numerous.)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: I’ve been in your body and it was a carnival ride. (Elias Bouchard/James Wright) (anonymous)

In his small flat, Elias Bouchard curled into a ball on his bed and screamed into his pillow. When the pain firstly subsided, there was blood on his pillowcase, from his mouth, nose, even from his eyes, running down his cheeks like tears. He stared at the stains in terrified confusion.

What the hell, what the _hell_ was happening?

But there was no time – he had to get to work. He scrubbed his face frantically at the sink, rinsed the taste of rust out of his mouth, threw on his clothes and rushed out to catch the bus.

“Good lord, Elias,” said James, when he finally turned up the Institute. “You look like you had a very bad night.”

“Y-you could say that,” Elias admitted, feeling very shaky. He set down his briefcase and sank into his dead chair. “I can’t… The whole night’s a complete blank. I-I actually can’t remember what I did after I left here yesterday.”

“I can,” said James Wright, who was the Institute’s director, and with a smirk that promised nothing good. Elias knew that well enough. He’d been working at the Magnus Institute for most of his life – officially, for four years, and unofficially, in fits and starts since he was a twelve-year-old office boy, and he knew most of James’s less pleasant moods. “Would you like me to tell you what you got up to last night, Elias?”

“You were… Watching? Or—damn it, James, you’re supposed to warn me before you use my eyes to See!” James paid no heed to his assistant’s protects, which sounded feeble even to Elias. His head hurt so much…

“I wasn’t using your eyes, dear boy. I was using _all_ of you. Yes,” he continued, with a sneering sort of pleasure, “I wanted to test something—if I could cast not merely my sight by my entire consciousness into your body. And it worked! Good god,” added James dreamily, “did it work. Last night was like a carnival ride.”

He didn’t offer to share the details again, and Elias decided he didn’t want to know.

“You could have at least warned me,” he said bitterly, turning to the piles of work on his desk. “I’ve never objected to you… utilizing me, in that fashion.”

“No, you’ve always been very obliging,” James agreed. “All the more reason to not tell you what I was attempting.” Again, the smirk. “You see, it’s so much more _satisfying_ when you don’t know what’s happening.”


	2. The Weeper

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Tears are all about the weeper, aren’t they? (Peter/Elias) (cigaretteburnslikefairylights)

The first time Peter meets Elias Bouchard, he is nobody, a privileged, overeducated nonentity working in Research. He is alone, as is nearly everyone who works at the Magnus Institute – the employees are nearly all without external connection and that is by design. His loneliness goes to Peter’s head like the taste of fresh black coffee, bitter and scouring on the palate. Father dead when he was eleven, mother likewise, not long after he’d finished forcing his way through university, love life nonexistent, and with crippling anxiety that he’s trying (unsuccessfully) to medicate with marijuana.

Peter scents blood in the water, and while he’s about his family’s business, makes excuses to chat with the small, pale man, who reminds him somehow of seaweed. Finds reasons to drop by to the Institute to see him. Elias isn’t entirely ignorant of what he’s involved with, and he recognizes Peter Lukas – not for what he is, perhaps, but for what he represents. Not connection, but permission to do without it, a terror so freeing that he breaks down in tears. And Peter… enjoys himself. 

“It’s all right,” he soothes. “Tears are all about the weeper, aren’t they? About how no one cares and no one will miss you when you’re gone. It’s not a failing, it just _is_. It’s so much better to just admit it.”

A few years go by. Peter returns to the Institute on a commission for his cousin Nathaniel, the only member of the family he sees on a regular basis. Nathaniel is the public face of the Lukas family, the outgoing one, but he never presumes that familiarity and family are mutually inclusive, and Peter finds him inoffensive to deal with. 

Elias, as he discovers when he arrives for his meeting with director James Wright, is no longer in Research. Instead, he is now assistant to the director. He’s more isolated than ever, and scared, and what is in store for him is so blatantly stamped across his psyche that Peter wonders if it was deliberate. 

James’s first words, when they are alone, leave him in no doubt. “You presume too much, Peter. These are _my_ people, which means I decide what their fate will be.”

“That’s hardly fair. I didn’t do anything to him. Well. Hardly anything.”

“Enough that I had to move faster than I’d anticipated. Anything more and he would have been of no use to me.” Jonah Magnus’s eyes glare at him from James Wright’s bony skull. “You can take my people for the Lonely when _I_ say so, Peter Lukas, and not one moment sooner.”

It is the last time they speak. A year or so later, he hears from Nathaniel that James Wright is dead, and understands in that same moment that so is Elias Bouchard. It doesn’t anger him, knowing that it was his interest that had doomed the fellow, at least in part… but it doesn’t make him especially thrilled, either. The next time he has cause to go to London, he asks to meet with the institute’s new director. 

When Peter is shown into the familiar office, an equally familiar weedy man is sitting behind the desk. His eyes are still irritated and watering, and he smiles distantly as he waves Peter into a chair and reaches for a handkerchief. 

“Sorry about this,” Elias says, dabbing at his eyes. “But as you say, tears are all about the weeper.”


	3. The Eye That Blinks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: A blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. (Peter/Elias) (iamnmbr3)

Peter _hated_ it when Elias Bouchard looked at him.

Really, he hated it when anyone looked at him, particularly when eye contact was made and someone else became that acutely aware of Peter Lukas as an actual person, and he became painfully, intimately conscious of that other person’s offensive existence.

He supposed it ought to have been different with Elias. After all, there was no one who knew him better, which made the experience even more excruciating, thanks to their familiarity, but at least it lacked the shock and surprise of realization.

Instead, it was far worse. Because it wasn’t simply Elias who looked at him. Elias was merely the blinking of the eye. And a blink of an eye, in itself, was nothing. It was the eye that blinked, that looked at Peter and _saw_ him.

There were lives behind those eyes, more than merely Elias and James and, ultimately, Jonah Magnus. And whenever those eyes in their stolen skull looked at him and watched him, Peter could feel all the lives behind them watching him, too.

And he hated it.

“How many others were there? Between you and… you.”

Elias raised his eyebrows in amusement, but he understood the intent of the question. That was the infuriating thing about him—well, one of many. He _always_ understood Peter’s intent, even when there were several. “Let’s see… give me a moment, it’s been quite a while since I’ve had to think about any of them. Hmm… ah yes. Between the Institute’s illustrious founder and myself, there have been four other directors.”

“You know you don’t have to refer to yourself in the third person. It’s not a secret.” Peter frowned. “The Institute’s only had six directors? In two hundred years? That… seems suspicious.”

“Not particularly so. Our directors have largely been blessed with excellent constitutions. Apart from James, of course.”

“Yes, that’s a good point: why _did_ you choose a host body with a congenital heart defect? Obviously you Look them over first.”

Elias chuckled. “Peter, Peter… he didn’t have a heart defect when I took him.”

“Then you… But why? Why go to all the trouble?”

“I liked this one better,” Elias said with a shrug. “Much better physique, even if he was a bit short. And the voice… mm. And, of course, Elias had already gotten your attention. You know I always like to have a Lukas at hand.”

“And this was a good way of keeping me interested. I see.”

Elias smiled broadly, something he didn’t often do and that Peter vastly preferred _not_ to be present for. “I really don’t think you do,” he said, eyes glittering. “But that’s nothing new.”


	4. The New Captain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: We have so many gods, and none of them can be trusted. (Peter Lukas) (portraitoftheoddity)

To the new (and at this moment, theoretical) captain of the _Tundra_ ,

I know that, in the event of my death while acting as director for the Magnus Institute, there is very little chance of reality continuing to exist as we know it – at least, not for very long. But my more business-minded relations have urged me to be ‘more optimistic’, and in any event, if Elias or one of his archival playthings doesn’t kill me, something eventually will, so they’ve asked me to write this letter of instruction, which (I assume) will be presented to you after my demise. And as they are technically the legal owners of my ship, I suppose I should at least pay lip-service to their demands. One has to stay on good terms with one’s family, after all, and I can’t really see Nathaniel entrusting the _Tundra_ to anyone who isn’t family.

As to the crew: they know their business. They’ve all been with me for over a decade now and are very content with their situations. Let the first mate see to things. He’s an admirably standoffish fellow and deeply dislikes change, but not even he can deny that the End comes for us all one day. Let him alone – he is a servant of our patron and knows what is required on that score, and so long as he understands what the ship and her new captain need from him, you can dismiss him from your mind.

On the subject of our patron, I hope I need say nothing. If you’re family, you serve the Forsaken in some capacity, whether you know it or not. Apologies, if that’s a revelation. But family is one thing and business is another. That much is obvious, or else I never would have gotten mixed up with the Magnus Institute in the first place, because old Mordechai would never have bothered to help found it. You’d think there would be some other connection there, beyond friendship and funding and the discovery of strange and terrible gods.

But that’s all there was. Believe me, I’ve asked.

So I can’t be entirely sure that you, my replacement, worship the same god that I do.

It is with that in mind that I close this letter, and this distasteful contemplation of someone I don’t know (which is still infinitely preferable to a contemplation of someone I do know) with a final piece of advice:

We have so many gods. And none of them can be trusted.

Be of use to them, feed them, and you will be rewarded. But watch your step, for they are all, always, hungry, and there is no mercy in their hearts, or pity, or forgiveness, no more than there is in the sea for a careless sailor who has lost their footing in a storm, and gone overboard.

For your sake, I do hope you understand Loneliness. I don’t think you’ll have a very easy time on the _Tundra_ , otherwise, and it would be inconvenient for Nathaniel to have to find yet another new captain so soon.

– Peter Lukas


	5. The Gallery

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: You are only one thing among many. (The Archivist) (cigaretteburnslikefairylights)

Some of the others had been in the director’s office since Elias had gone to prison, to ‘meet’ with Peter Lukas, but Jon had not. And he hadn’t intended to be here now, but Rosie had asked him, as a favour, as she had to run to an appointment, to escort a delivery up to the office. 

As soon as he saw the tall, flat parcel the delivery men carried between them, he knew where it needed to go.

“This way,” he said to the two men, who were only men. He led them past the closed door of Martin’s office, into the director’s empty workspace. “You can put it here, on the table. I’ll... I’ll take charge of it from here.”

The delivery men laid the parcel down and took their leave. 

Jon stared at the brown paper covering for a long time. Then he turned to the director’s desk. Guided by knowledge he should not have had, he took a key from behind a secret panel in the center drawer. There was a bookcase in the corner, full of very boring volumes of non-profit case law, the kind of books that would make a person’s eyes slide off their titles and want to look anywhere else. 

He gripped the top shelf and tugged gently; the bookcase swung easily on its hinges, revealing a door. Jon fitted the key, unlocked the door, and stepped inside. 

It was a small room, with motion-triggered lighting overhead, and on the walls, six portraits, with space for a seventh. Jon looked at the faces, the names and the dates on the gilded frames, and as realization washed over him, so did a dull, resigned horror. 

They were his predecessors, all of them. They were the Archivists. 

And as he looked into their eyes of oil and canvas, he... Knew. 

Malachi Wells, personal friend and confidante to Jonah Magnus, who had been the Institute’s first Archivist in Edinburgh, working out of Jonah’s own townhouse and cataloging the earliest terrors to be recorded, until the Slaughter had overtaken him, and his wife and children as well. 

Stephen Wraxall, dry and academic and acerbic, and as eager as Magnus himself to watch and to know, but too willing to leave the confines of his Archives in search of knowledge. A seasoned traveler and collector of antiquities, the Institute’s earliest artifacts had been of his acquisition, and they proved to be his undoing. 

Amos Thornley, who for nearly forty years had lived among his books and papers and letters, watching in detachment as his assistants arrived and departed, fought and succumbed, lived and died, always returning to his statements in the end, until in the end, he became only one more experience among many in the boxes on his shelves. 

Gilbert Manningtree, the latest and last of Thornley’s assistants, who had seemed likely to follow in his own predecessor’s footsteps, until the horrors of the mundane world had nearly overwhelmed otherworldly ones. He couldn’t resign, of course, so he simply went absent without leave, enlisting in the army but dying of a wasting illness before he could make it aboard the transport ship. 

Letitia Crowe, a promising young Somerville-trained historian with ambitions to prove herself and a web of encounters in her past to pull her forward, on and on against her own better judgment, until she was little more than an empty husk. 

Angus Stacy, torn apart by his academic aspirations and the Stranger’s masks, in equal measure. 

And beside his portrait, a blank space, and a waiting picture hanger. 

Jon unwrapped the flat parcel and, carefully, hung the portrait of Gertrude Robinson in the place that had been allotted for her. He gazed into the painted eyes of his predecessor, pleading silently for answers, for guidance... but the cold, flat visage gave him nothing. 

He locked the door and replaced both key and bookcase, and left the director’s office. 

It hadn’t escaped his notice that there was no eventual place for him, in that gallery.


	6. Struggle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: No one cares how you struggle, after the lights go out. (Elias Bouchard) (iamnmbr3)

He had prayed, at the beginning. To the god whose church he’d been perfunctorily raised in, at first. Then to the ghosts of his parents. Then, finally, just that someone would _notice_ what had happened.

No one did. No one noticed that Elias Bouchard’s meteoric rise from clerk in Artifact Storage to personal assistant to the director to Director of the Magnus Institute, in the unheard-of span of five years, had also come with a change in eye color.

Elias _knew_ the eyes in his skull were different now. It was the only thing he was sure had changed, because the only time he was able to see at all, after, was when Jonah glanced into a mirror. Which he did not do often. The rest of the time, everything was darkness.

His entire life now was darkness, and for the most part, silence.

He could hear things sometimes. Rarely. Familiar voices, people he had known before. Emma Harvey. Gertrude. …Peter.

Elias _hated_ how much he yearned for Peter Lukas’s voice, for Peter’s presence brought him the chance to be himself again, for a few minutes, and perhaps even see himself in Peter’s eyes, as gray and cold as a winter sea.

But when Peter left, that cold gray sea closed in over him, drowning him once more in darkness.

Was he even alive anymore? Or did he simply exist, as a kind of afterthought that could never quite be expunged? Elias had no idea.

Jonah never bothered to ‘speak’ to him, never directed his internal monologue further inward to speak to the remnant of the man he had all but consumed. Could Jonah even do that? Would he have tried, if he could?

Probably not. It hardly mattered. _Elias_ had never mattered.


	7. The Visit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Someone is digging your grave right now. (Oliver Banks) (cigaretteburnslikefairylights & kiwimeringue)

Elias was used to visitors in prison. The Detective came often enough, to berate him angrily and pace until he sent her off on another chase to another inevitable dead end. And there was his solicitor, of course, a truly ineffectual man who thought he was doing his best for an obstreperous client but who was, as he had always been, utterly oblivious to the realities of what he was dealing with. Elias was as amused by him as he was annoyed. And even Peter dropped by occasionally, though never when anyone else was around to notice.

So he was used to visitors. 

Of course, he was also used to _Seeing_ those visitors before the actually turned up. Bodily. In his cell. 

Elias looked up from his Heyer novel. “Can I help you, Mr…?”

“Oliver Banks.”

“Ah.” He closed the book and sat up slowly, and if he was more than a little cautious about taking his eyes off a servant of the End, well, he didn’t think anyone who knew would blame him. Particularly this servant. “If you need assistance with someone, you’d do better to visit the Institute. As you can see, I’m someone… limited in my assets, at the moment.”

“Oh, no,” said Oliver, with a very appealing smile, and the appraising expression of a farmer looking at ripening crops. “I’m here to see you.”

“Why?” asked Elias bluntly. “I have had an inordinate amount of practice in anticipating my own demises, and I’m not due to die just yet.”

“Not naturally,” Oliver agreed, “no. But someone is digging your grave right now. I’ve just come from the site. It’s quite a lovely spot. Quite remote.”

For a long moment, there was silent in the tiny private prison cell. Then Elias smiled. It was not a nice expression. “And you’re telling me this… why?”

“I’m not sure. Never am about these things. I’ll figure it out someday, I expect. But I wanted to see you. See you as you are now.”

“You’re not the first avatar of the End who’s come to talk with me. I’m sure you won’t be the last.”

“Are you? Honestly… I’m not. You can’t hide forever, Jonah. You’re feeding the End, of course, through your very persistence... but you’re also keeping someone from us.”

“You’re more than welcome to Elias, as it were, once I’m done with him,” said the prisoner smoothly. “At the moment, however, I do still require a body. Thanks to your help in reviving the Archivist, with luck, I won’t be needing this one for much longer. Do send my regards to Annabelle, by the way.”

It was a dismissal, and Oliver ignored it. He was still gazing at Elias intently, and Elias did not at all like the way the avatar of the End was focusing on his neck... and on his eyes. “Do you know,” said Oliver pleasantly, “I can’t tell whose death I’m looking at right now? It might be Elias Bouchard’s... or it might be yours, Jonah Magnus. The tendrils are wrapped around you so thickly... But it doesn’t really matter.”

Elias refused break eye contact, even as Oliver rose to go. “No?”

“Not really. Won’t be long now, either way.” And he smiled. “As I said, someone is digging your grave right now.”


	8. Bruises

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Your eyes aren’t eyes. I can find no cure for their sting. (og!Elias) (iamnmbr3)

Elias remembered, sometimes, the people he had loved, a long time ago, before the Magnus Institute. Before Jonah. Their faces were faded and their voices distant, but their eyes lingered in his memory, like old bruises under his skin that only hurt when he prodded at them.

_(Is that what bruises had felt like?)_

The most faded face was a man’s, with eyes that Elias recognized only because they looked as his own had once looked, guarded but warm. With the face came a memory of a trip to Scotland… to somewhere famous… a loch? Had they been looking for something?

_(Bruises stung, like salt in old unhealed wounds.)_

A middle-aged woman in a bed, looking up at him with mingled pain and pride. She was holding something in her hands, a piece of paper with an official seal, and… and crying. And he was crying. Why was he crying?

_(Bruises ached, as pieces torn away ached with phantom pain.)_

A face Elias wasn’t sure he had ever truly seen, and eyes as soft and pitying and gentle as the hands that touched his body. They hadn’t loved him, not really, but they had cared enough to… why couldn’t he remember their face?

_(Bruises burned, like desire, like shame, like longing.)_

A man whose face wasn’t faded at all, whose voice rasped smugly at his ears. “You’ve got the job, Mr. Bouchard. I look forward to working with you.”

_(His eyes were nothing but bruises, and they hurt.)_


	9. Grief

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: I am to think of you when I sit alone or wake at night alone. (Jon/Martin) (anonymous)

_“I really loved you, you know.”_

Loved, past tense. And for a little while, a breath, a _blink_ , Jon had let himself hope that the past could become present, and even future.

Stupid, really. To believe that he could have a future.

He lay beside Martin on the bed that they had learned how to share and watched him, twitching and writhing in his sleep. More than once, Jon had tried to wake him, crying with second-hand anguish as Martin’s nightmares clawed at both of their brains, but it was useless.

Perhaps he would never wake now. Jon didn’t know, and the Eye was silent on the matter. Its attention was very firmly elsewhere.

All he could do was sit there, alone, through the thick red haze that passed for both day and night, his mind full of grief and Martin.

Eventually, he went into the living room, back to the table with the recorder and the tapes. Out here, at least, he could stop seeing someone else’s dreams, could stop being scared that Martin would never wake up. Out here, he had only the fears of everyone else in the world to contend with.

When Martin did finally wake, there was barely room within Jon for relief. He had the tapes, with the voices of people he had loved, and people he had hated, and people he had never understood or even met but who had somehow led him to this place, and he mourned for them all.

_“I love you, I just… I need more time…”_

Unsure of why it had switched on in the first place, Jon turned the tape recorder off. He felt… like he ought to be curious about it. But there didn’t seem to be a point, anymore.

Martin sighed. He sounded so tired, and Jon’s heart bled a little more. Martin put his hand over Jon’s on the tape recorder. “I love you.”

Jon froze. “Y… why?”

“Dunno, really. Always have.”

He stared in despair at Martin’s small, crooked grin. “No, I mean… after all this, why… _Why_?”

Martin dropped his eyes to their joined hands. “Some things, there just aren’t answers for,” he said softly. His thumb stroked hesitantly at the delicate skin of Jon’s wrist. “Some things just… are.”


End file.
